BAKING BREAD AT HOME: A healthy alternative to store-bought bread

Those who already bake bread at home probably do it for the taste, sense of accomplishment, and for being able to eat it at the peak of freshness, but homemade bread also provides a healthy alternative to most store-bought versions. When you make your own bread you have a number of ingredient options and control over which ingredients you include. It also means you can eat a more natural product than the one you would buy at the grocery store. Here are some tips on making healthy homemade bread.

Keep your ingredient list simple

Bread at its most basic includes only flour, yeast, salt and water, whereas the bread you buy at the store can have multiple ingredients, including ones we have no knowledge of or can’t even pronounce. Some of these include preservatives like calcium propionate, which some people have adverse reactions to and has been linked to ADD in children. Though for the most part preservatives aren’t considered harmful in the correct quantity, by making your bread at home, you can ensure that you know exactly what you’re consuming.

Minimize the sugar

By making homemade bread, you control the amount and type of sugar you use, which is great if you’re looking to minimize the sugar in your diet or would like to replace traditional sugars with more nutritious sweeteners like honey. Some bread recipes include as little as 1 ½ tablespoons of molasses and no other sweetener. Other bread recipes don’t include any sugar or sweetener at all.

Choose healthier flours

Baking your own bread means you have numerous options for the flours you bake with. Rye, whole wheat and unbleached all-purpose flours are just a few choices. For example, rye flour is high in fibre, lowers type 2 diabetes risk, and helps to fight cancer and heart disease. Furthermore, if you happen to be gluten-intolerant, there are several gluten-free flours you can use including rice, buckwheat and nut flours.

One kind of flour to be aware of is your typical all-purpose flour, which is chemically bleached, and also happens to be common in store-bought breads. Flour tends to be bleached for cosmetic reasons, to make the flour look perfectly white, but a by-product of the bleaching process is alloxan, which has apparently been found to cause diabetes in experimental animals and could be harmful to humans as well. To avoid consumption of alloxan, bake your bread at home with flour that you’ve chosen yourself. Be sure to buy the bag of flour labelled “unbleached all-purpose flour” instead of the regular and bake your way to health.

5 Responses

Thank you for your comment. Although I chose to focus on the advantages to making bread at home here, particularly nutritional benefits, it is true that many bread recipes are quite complicated and do require a lot of practice. It is worth noting that there are quite a few recipes that are easy for beginners as well, and I’ve found that more often than not, you always end up with bread worth eating, even after making mistakes.

What I would suggest for beginner bread bakers is to start with the easier recipes that don’t take 12 to 24 hours to make, don’t require a poolish or some kind of starter, or anything else very complicated. To make it part of your routine, don’t try to make bread every single day, but maybe try it on a weekend once a month. Once you get the hang of it, you can work your way up to more complex bread recipes, challenge your skills, and maybe even start to bake bread weekly.

I started baking bread about a year ago, and now do it consistently, but I certainly don’t have all the skills down yet. I am only now challenging myself to do proper scoring, baking with steam, and learning about folding the dough during the rising process, so it’s absolutely worth noting that even if you make a few mistakes, you still can get something good out of it. I guess that’s why I haven’t given up yet, so hopefully that’s a bit of encouragement for those who find the thought of baking their own bread intimidating.

I loved your article, Megan, and appreciated that you focused on the good !;) I have been baking bread all my life because my mother thaugt me when I was small. I have made beautiful elaborate breads , simple everyday breads…..all by hand, or mixed with my kitchenaid or with breadmachines more recently. This is just to say that there are many choices and options now….. but I always return to baking bread! There is something utterly satisfying about creating your own bread ….smelling up the house and then taking that first bite of still warm bread! And, as you said so well, storebought bread is definitely inferior in quality.

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